Review - The Confederate War

Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War; Harvard University
Press: Cambridge; 1997

Writer and editor Gary Gallagher seems to have found a secure niche
in the field of Civil War scholarship. For the past twenty years,
Gallagher has been chief editor for almost two dozen essay collections
on Civil War military history. With The Confederate War he shifts his
focus from campaigns and commanders to the Southern Confederacy,
in an attempt to explain why the Confederates were ultimately
defeated.

As he has done with other Civil War topics, Gallagher examines
recent scholarship on reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat and
finds it wanting. In the absence of social upheaval in the North,
many scholars have concluded that internal frictions and
controversies weakened the Confederacy’s war effort, estranged
its civilians, sapped its armies through desertion, and eventually
forced its collapse. Several scapegoats have been offered: an
incomplete or non-existent national vision, a breakdown in
cooperation between aristocratic slaveholders and yeomen, a
costly and impractical military strategy, even a collective guilt
about the morality of slavery. Though there is no consensus on
which factor is most to blame, these scholars insist that the
Confederacy’s defeat came from within, not from without.

Through four essays concerning the most common themes
regarding internal defeat---including Popular Will, Nationalism,
and Military Strategy---Gallagher contends that the Confederacy
struggled longer and harder than any other fledgling nation, even
more than the American colonies during the Revolution. Though
the Confederacy lost one-third of its able-bodied male population,
two-thirds of its prewar wealth, and most of its infrastructure,
it was still maintaining armies in the field as late as 1865. Were
the Confederate people painfully deluded? Were they full of
wishful thinking? Or were they anticipating that external
events---such as battlefield victories or a negotiated peace
settlement---would decide the outcome of the war?

Gallagher believes they were waiting for victory, and with the
testimony he cites from countless Confederates it is hard to
arrive at a different conclusion. There is little to indicate either
a fatal loss of will or a lack of nationalistic feelings. Through
victories and defeats, good times and (mostly) lean times, the
Confederates in Gallagher’s essays wrote and spoke frequently
of their desire to see the war through to victory. More importantly,
they acted on this desire, through voluntary military service, home
front support of the soldiers’ needs, and faithful, if not necessarily
cheerful, submission to wartime privations. Far from going to war
with an indifferent attachment to their country, most Confederates
saw themselves as patriots fighting for a cause as holy as that of
1776; victory would prove their pedigrees as the spiritual
descendants of the American Revolution. Even the divisive issue
of arming slaves enjoyed more support than has been widely believed. To Gallagher the Confederates seemed prepared to do anything, even to dismantle their entire society, in order to achieve independence.

Recent studies may emphasize disaffection between various parts of Confederate society, but Gallagher claims that most of these have focused on a few small parts of the Confederacy and that scholars have mistakenly extrapolated such findings onto a larger scale, assuming that the same feelings were held throughout the eleven Confederate states. Again, the letters and diaries suggest that most Confederates bonded together for a common cause. Soldiers may have felt cheated by speculators and disheartened by bad news from home, but even so most of them remained in the ranks until the bitter end. Wealthy slaveholders and poor yeomen may have grumbled about rising inflation, government impressments, and restricted civil liberties, but Gallagher warns against mistaking this for hostility towards the Confederate government, any more than grumbling about taxes should be construed as plotting to overthrow one’s own government. Once more, the proof is in the actions of all classes of Confederate society: military service, financial contribution, and patient endurance.

The military strategies of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee have likewise been the subject of many recent critiques. Scholars contend that Davis ought to have pursued a “people’s war” of guerilla fighting, that Lee should have stood on the defensive more often, and that both men fatally dispersed and depleted their manpower. Gallagher skillfully defends the general and his president against their modern-day armchair critics. Guerilla fighting was contrary to both Southern military culture and Confederate military doctrine, and, as Gallagher illustrates by way of comparison with the American Revolution, it was useless without foreign intervention. More importantly, a guerilla war would have left the South defenseless against bloody slave uprisings. As for Lee, his aggressive generalship might have bled the Confederacy white, but nevertheless he provided victories that kept Southern morale afloat. Nor was a defensive strategy a guarantee of success, as was demonstrated by the collapse of the Confederacy’s Western defensive line in early 1862. Furthermore, the burgeoning Confederate nationalism evinced in the letters and diaries would have suffered a heavy blow if Confederate armies had purposefully abandoned large swaths of territory, even for sound military reasons.

To Gallagher, the real story of the Confederacy’s defeat is the oldest one: the Confederacy was worn down by the Northern military. Though Confederates hoped against hope through the closing days of April 1865, theirs was not to be a successful struggle. But Gallagher considers it a mistake to ascribe their defeat to an inability to get along with each other and to fight together; the final statistics of defeat---and the letters and diaries quoted---make that a dubious claim.

Gallagher draws on a wealth of primary and secondary sources to support his thesis. He has clearly studied the authors whose conclusions he faults, and his knowledge of Civil War scholarly findings is firm. The rest of the book is founded on sound reasoning. One minor fault is the absence of a standard bibliography. Gallagher provides informative endnotes, but a summary of sources used would have been helpful.

Gallagher does not claim to know how the Confederacy might have won, and he allows that much work remains for scholars researching this topic. Still, he conclusively argues that the theory of internal defeat needs a serious examination. As he sees it, the Confederates did the best they could with what they had, against enemies more foreign than domestic. In the end they were unable to win their independence. Still, they came very close.

The Lincoln-Kennedy Ties, And a Possible Clue

A popular historical urban legend concerns the supposed similarities between the deaths of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Most people are familiar with them---"Both presidents were succeeded by men named Johnson", "Both presidents were shot in the back of the head", "Both presidents were assassinated on a Friday", "Booth shot Lincoln in a theater, and was finally killed in a warehouse / Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse, and was captured in a theater", etc.---and most serious historians will contend that most of these similarities are either patently untrue or else coincidental (such as the fact that both Lincoln and Kennedy were both elected to Congress in years ending with the digits "46": Lincoln in 1846, Kennedy in 1946).

The urban legend debunking site Snopes has this to say about one of the better known Lincoln-Kennedy similarities:

Lincoln's secretary, Kennedy, warned him not to go to Ford's Theater. Kennedy's secretary, Lincoln, warned him not to go to Dallas.

This is one of those coincidences that isn't a coincidence at all---it's simply wrong. John Kennedy did have a secretary named Evelyn Lincoln (who may or may not have warned him about going to Dallas), but one searches in vain to find a Lincoln secretary named Kennedy. (Lincoln's White House secretaries were John G. Nicolay and John Hay.)

So...no Lincoln secretary named Kennedy, eh? Well...case closed, then.

But...what if another possibility exists?

In the December 2008 issue of Civil War Times Illustrated, an article by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, extracted from a full length book about Lincoln's time as president-elect (November 1860-March 1861), addressed Lincoln's incognito passage through pro-secessionist Baltimore, Maryland on the way to his inauguration. Concerned about threats against the life of the president-elect, Lincoln's aides and friends convinced him to "sneak through" Baltimore by night rather than make his scheduled daytime appearance there.

This passage, describing one of three letters of warning that Lincoln received while stopping over in Philadelphia, caught my eye:

"Stone's report completed the package and quoted a New York 'detective officer' who had been on duty in Baltimore for three weeks and now believed 'there is serious danger of violence to and the assassination of Mr. Lincoln in his passage through that city should the time of that passage be
known.'...Unmentioned---it would have meant little at the time, but a great deal just a few months later---was the fact that the 'detective officer' in question, John A. Kennedy, superintendent of the New York Metropolitan Police, had taken his discoveries to Stone...Stone had rushed Kennedy's warning to Scott, an alarmed Scott had shared it with Seward, and Seward had summoned his son and entrusted him to speed it to Lincoln 'wherever he is.' (emphases mine)"

So here we do, in fact, have a Kennedy who, at one point in what was in all probability a life of obscurity, warned Lincoln about a threat to his life, although obviously not the same threat familiar to history. In the end, Lincoln made the journey safely, was sworn into office during the first week of March, 1861, and led the country through four years of civil war before finally falling victim to John Wilkes Booth's bullet in April 1865.

Is it possible that somewhere along the way, someone (an obscure Lincoln scholar perhaps?) might have mentioned Detective Kennedy's name in context with this earlier assassination attempt on Lincoln, perhaps to an equally obscure JFK scholar, who could then have referenced the name of Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln? Might this "truth" about the crossed paths of two presidential assassinations have arisen from a careless mangling of what were, on the surface, indisputable facts?

The possibility tantalizes, does it not?

Still, we can never know for certain.

Anti-Revisionism, Part 1

...Because we just can't let the new interpretations be the only ones, now can we?


Here's a rejoinder to the frequent argument, made to tear down an established "great person", by saying, "Well, they weren't all that great; after all, their competition was second rate. They were just lucky":


(NOTE: The source is G. F. Henderson's Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, published sometime in the early 20th century; exact date unknown)

"By the ignorant and the envious success in war is easily explained away. The dead military lion, and, for that matter, even the living, is a fair mark for the heels of a baser animal. The greatest captains have not escaped the critics. The genius of Napoleon has been belittled on the ground that each one of his opponents, except Wellington, was only second-rate. French historians have attributed Wellington's victories to the mutual jealousy of the French marshals; and it has been asserted that Moltke triumphed only because his adversaries blundered. Judged by this rule few reputations would survive. In war, however, it is as impossible to avoid error as it is to avoid loss of life; but it is by no means simple either to detect or to take advtange of mistakes. Before both Napoleon and Wellington an unsound manuever was dangerous in the extreme. None were so quick to see the slip, none more prompt to profit by it. Herein, to a great extent, lay the secret of their success, and herein lies the true measure of military genius. A general is not necessarily incapable because he makes a false move; both Napoleon and Wellington, in the long course of their campaigns, gave many openings to a resolute foe, and both missed opportunities. Under ordinary circumstances mistakes may easily escape notice altogether, or at all events pass unpunished, and the reputation of the leader who commits them will remain untarnished. But if he is pitted against a master of war a single false step may lead to irretrievable ruin; and he will be classed as beneath contempt for a fault which his successful antagonist may have committed with impunity a hundred times over."

Revisionism, Part 1

I have a love-hate relationship with historical revisionism; love because it provokes new thoughts and challenges old assumptions, and keeps my thinking fresh, hate because it tends to tear down my idols and erect in their places tarnished images that I don't particularly care for.

But in the spirit of revisionism, I'd like to present the following excerpt from a series of essays on the Fredericksburg Campaign, entitled (appropriately enough) The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock, edited by Gary Gallagher.

Chew on this for a while:

When Robert E. Lee spends more than five hours hammering the Federal position at Gaines's Mill, assaulting uphill on a constricted front against a strong, entrenched enemy who is well supported by artillery, losing nearly 8,000 men in the process,he is called bold and ferocious. When Ambrose Burnside spends more than five hours hammering [the Rebel position at] Marye's Heights, assaulting uphill on a constricted front against a strong, entrenched enemy who is well supported by artillery,losing nearly 8,000 men in the process, he is called stubborn and stupid. In each case, the army commander operated in anticipation of a left-flank movement that never came. The only real difference is that when John Bell Hood told his Texans to rush at the enemy without firing and get in among them with the bayonet, they succeeded,whereas when Andrew Humphreys gave the same instructions to his division of untried [Pennsylvania] militiamen, they failed (p.23).*

I guess the only way you could reconcile the above two situations
is with that old adage, "Nothing succeeds like success." It covers
over a multitude of errors. Likewise, lack of success will obscure
a multitude of good deeds and best intentions.

* For the ill-informed, here are some
links to the above-mentioned battles:

Gaines's Mill - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaines%27_Mill

Fredericksburg - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fredericksburg

Peachtree Creek - The Park That Wasn't

This past Monday was another one of the summer/fall lectures at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, which I attended. The subject was the attempt to create a National Battlefield Park at Peachtree Creek during the 1890's through the 1920's, at least ten or fifteen years before anyone mentioned Kennesaw itself as a viable park.

In a few days I'll put up my notes about it; in the meantime, I'm toying with a little appropriate Photoshop madness to spruce this particular post up a bit.

Meanwhile, here's a little more Peachtree Creek, for those unfamiliar with the battle there:

http://ngeorgia.com/history/peachtreecreek.html

Hardee at Kennesaw Mountain: Official Records

Even though his corps bore the brunt of the fighting
there, Hardee never covered the operations on the Kennesaw
line in his official report to the Richmond government,
preferring instead to spill much ink in defense of his
actions during the battles around Atlanta. Additionally,
the report itself was not presented until April 5,1865
(just four days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox), which
meant that there was little time for Hardee to add anything
further, even if he had wanted to. Whatever "Old Reliable"
thought about the June 27th fight, he never committed it
to paper.

The only item from Hardee's report pertinent to Kennesaw
is an addendum from his assistant adjutant-general, Colonel
T. B. Roy, made in response to a query from the CS Army's
Inspector General, Samuel Cooper, about losses at Kennesaw.
Roy supplied the following:

I think our loss was 100 and some
few odd. It was almost nothing. Estimates
of enemy's losses in front of Cheatham and
Cleburne's left varied from 2,000 to 5,000.
Captain Buel (captured the other day) says
2,000.

Attached was a table that broke down the loss in
killed, wounded and missing for the divisions of
Cheatham and Cleburne.

Thankfully for the historical record, Hardee's subordinates
would not be so tight-lipped about the Kennesaw fight.

Pickett's Charge (July 3, 1863) - In Memoriam

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once

but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's

still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863,

the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the

guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags

are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself

with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand

probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill

waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the

balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet,

it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not

to begin against that position and those circumstances

which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and

Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin,

we all know that, we have come too far with too much

at stake and that moment doesn't need even a

fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this

time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain:

Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome

of Washington itself to crown with desperate and

unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast

made two years ago....

---from Intruder In the Dust by William Faulkner (1948)

I've never read the book, but I remember the passage from Ken Burns' series.